Interior Freedom

by Jacques Philippe

Our heart is imprisoned by our selfishness or fears, and it is we who need to change, to learn how to love, letting ourselves be transformed by the Holy Spirit; that is the only way of escaping from our sense of confinement. People who haven’t learned how to love will always feel like victims; they will feel restricted wherever they are. But people who love never feel restricted. This is what little St. Thérèse taught me. She made me understand another important thing as well, but one to be considered later: that our inability to love comes most often from our lack of faith and our lack of hope.

Nobody can ever prevent us. “For I am sure that neither death, nor life, not angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”15

“Man suffers most through his fear of suffering,” Etty Hillesum said.

Whatever happened she passed the day peacefully and was never upset. In everything she could do her will, because her will was to accept everything.

Those imperfections also help us not to look to others for happiness, plenitude, and fulfillment we can find only in God.

Thus they invite us to “take root” in God. Disappointment in a relationship with someone from whom we were expecting a lot (perhaps too much) can teach us to go deeper in prayer, in our relationship with God, and to look to him for that fullness, that peace and security, that only his infinite love can guarantee. Disappointments in relationships with other people oblige us to pass from “idolatrous” love to a love that is realistic, free, and happy. Romantic love will always be threatened with disappointments. Charity never is, because it “does not insist on its own way”54 or seek its own interest.

Jesus says in St. Mark’s Gospel: “There is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him!”57 Harm does not come to us from external circumstances, but from how we react to them interiorly. “What ruins our souls is not what happens outside, but the echo that it awakes within us.”58 The harm that other people do to me never comes from them, it comes from me.

Things seldom happen as we expect. Most of our fears and apprehensions turn out to be completely imaginary. Difficulties we anticipated become very simple in reality; and the real difficulties are things that didn’t occur to us. It’s better to accept things as they come, one after another, trusting that we will have the grace to deal with them at the right time, than to invent a host of scenarios about what may happen—scenarios that normally turn out to be wrong. The best way to prepare for the future is to put our hearts into the present.

Fear of suffering, as we’ve seen, causes more pain than suffering does. We need to live accordingly.

“Someone who sees his own sin is greater than someone who raises the dead,” the Desert Fathers said. Peter passed from presumption to hope. Hope is the virtue of people who know they are infinitely weak and easily broken, and rely firmly on God with utter trust. Peter for the first time in his life made a real act of hope: “What I’m not capable of doing by my own strength, I hope for from you, O my God. Not by virtue of my merits, because I have none, but by virtue of your mercy alone.”

Faith and hope are provisional; they exist only for this earth and will pass away.

In heaven, faith will be replaced by sight, and hope by possession; only love will never pass away. It will never be replaced by anything else, because it is the goal of all. On this earth, love is the fullest participation in the life of heaven, and faith and hope exist for its sake.

“The greatest obstacles to holiness are discouragement and worry.”17